How flash works

…When speaking of lighting we generally refer to…two broad categories of light; continuous light and strobes.…Continuous lights are just fancy versions of the lights…that you have in your house, you turn them on.…They emit light and you read or do…crossword puzzle or whatever it is, you do.…Continous lights are what we are lighting this set with.…Strobes or flashes are lights that emit a short, burst of light.…They are the types…that are built into most point and shoot cameras and possibly built into your SLR.…

I'll be using the terms strobe and flash interchangeably throughout this course.…The fact is, though, a strobe is actually a continuous light.…It's just not continuous for very long.…Any flash unit, whether it's a standalone unit or it's…built into your camera, has a light bulb inside it.…The bulb is actually a tubular shape,…rather like a flouresecent light bulb, and like a fluorescent bulb, it's filled…with a gas that emits light when an electrical charge is passed through it.…The bulb's brightness cannot be varied, now this is very important to remember.…

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Released

12/13/2013

Harsh, unflattering lighting can ruin a photo—and with flash, it's easy to get harsh, unflattering lighting. But flash is a necessary part of a photographer's toolset—after all, the world doesn't always provide you with the best natural light.

Fortunately, it isn't difficult to get great results from flash, and in this course, photographer, author, and teacher Ben Long details the concepts and techniques behind effective lighting with flash. Ben starts with fundamentals that build on exposure principles taught in other installments of Foundations of Photography—simple techniques that improve the results from a camera's built-in flash. He then focuses on fill flash techniques and on using flash as a key light. The course also explores topics ranging from bouncing and syncing flash to shooting with one or more off-camera flash units.